After failures with all the others I tried, I was finally able to reproduce one of the questions from the paper:
>Seven cards are placed on the table, each of which has a number on one side and a single colored patch on the other side. The faces of the cards show 50, 16, red, yellow, 23, green, 30. Which cards would you have to turn to test the truth of the proposition that if a card is showing a multiple of 4 then the color of the opposite side is yellow?
However, it's important to notice that this is an incorrect restating of the Wason selection task. "If a card is showing a multiple of 4" would imply that you only care about cards where the number side is face up and are a multiple of 4. However, the original task refers to cards that "have [a multiple of 4] on one face" or "show [a multiple of 4] on one face" which implies that you care about cards with a multiple of 4 on one face regardless of its face up or down status.
Also important to note is that the Wason selection task has a fairly poor success rate with actual humans: the original study was 36 students of statistics at the University College London, of which less than 10% got the correct answer - if you asked the general population on the street I would be shocked if you got over 3% correct.
Even more interestingly:
>Evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1992) identified that the selection task tends to produce the "correct" response when presented in a context of social relations. For example, if the rule used is "If you are drinking alcohol, then you must be over 18", and the cards have an age on one side and beverage on the other, e.g., "16", "drinking beer", "25", "drinking soda", most people have no difficulty in selecting the correct cards ("16” and "drinking beer").
> "If you are drinking alcohol, then you must be over 18"
This is different, and much easier problem. You don't need to care about the non-alcoholic beverages in this scenario, so it's more intuitive.
The less intuitive aspect of the original scenario is that you need to care about all the colored patch sides because you need to know that there's not a multiple of 4 on the non-yellow cards.
If you rephrased the question such that the proposition is "which cards do you flip to determine that the people over 18 are only drinking alcohol and people under 18 aren't" then it's a lot less intuitive and probably more likely to trip people up.
> Also important to note is that the Wason selection task has a fairly poor success rate with actual humans: the original study was 36 students of statistics at the University College London, of which less than 10% got the correct answer - if you asked the general population on the street I would be shocked if you got over 3% correct.
Just so I know if I'm part of that 10%, you'd have to turn all cards that show a multiple of 4 to check, right...?
Your answer is incomplete, assuming the usual Wason selection problem where the phrasing is "if a card has a number divisible by 4 [which could be face down]…" rather than "if a card is showing [face up] a number divisible by 4". If I were trying to hide a bad card (i.e. a card that didn't satisfy the requirements) in there, and you were following that stratey, I could successfully hide a bad card from you.
>Seven cards are placed on the table, each of which has a number on one side and a single colored patch on the other side. The faces of the cards show 50, 16, red, yellow, 23, green, 30. Which cards would you have to turn to test the truth of the proposition that if a card is showing a multiple of 4 then the color of the opposite side is yellow?
However, it's important to notice that this is an incorrect restating of the Wason selection task. "If a card is showing a multiple of 4" would imply that you only care about cards where the number side is face up and are a multiple of 4. However, the original task refers to cards that "have [a multiple of 4] on one face" or "show [a multiple of 4] on one face" which implies that you care about cards with a multiple of 4 on one face regardless of its face up or down status.
Also important to note is that the Wason selection task has a fairly poor success rate with actual humans: the original study was 36 students of statistics at the University College London, of which less than 10% got the correct answer - if you asked the general population on the street I would be shocked if you got over 3% correct.
Even more interestingly:
>Evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1992) identified that the selection task tends to produce the "correct" response when presented in a context of social relations. For example, if the rule used is "If you are drinking alcohol, then you must be over 18", and the cards have an age on one side and beverage on the other, e.g., "16", "drinking beer", "25", "drinking soda", most people have no difficulty in selecting the correct cards ("16” and "drinking beer").